HONOLULU -- In this Pacific paradise where outrigger canoe racing is the state's official team sport and pro surfers are viewed as demigods, college football has traditionally been a pale imitation of the circus-like spectacle that it is in the Southeast.

But now all eyes in the Aloha State are on the Superdome, where the University of Hawaii will play the University of Georgia on Tuesday in the Allstate Sugar Bowl.

As the game approaches, there are signs that emotions here are tipping from mere excitement to a frenzy worthy of a Southeastern Conference team. The university's decision to decline its full allocation of Sugar Bowl tickets caused a monumental uproar. Fans are spending thousands of dollars for airfare alone and taking extraordinarily circuitous routes to reach New Orleans. Meanwhile, a new hardcover paean to the team titled, "Hawaii Warrior Football: A Story of Faith, Hope and Redemption," has sold 22,500 copies, and its publisher has a waiting list of 10,000.

It's classic, fervent football fever.

Even now, the fervor in some ways fails to match that of places like Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, said Peter Kim, a Honolulu businessman and former kicker for the Crimson Tide. Hawaii does not have the history or tradition of some big programs, Kim said.

And football does not pervade the Hawaiian culture as it does in other places.

Still, Kim said, people in Hawaii realize they are witnessing something unprecedented, something they may never see again.

And in that sense, the emotions exceed those felt in even the most die-hard college football towns.

"Everyone is saying, 'This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,' " Kim said. "They realize, hey, this is more than just a football game."

The mania "compares to what it was like when I was playing for the Redskins and we made it to the playoffs," said John Wilbur, a Honolulu resident, Hawaii fan and former offensive lineman for the 1972 National Football Conference champions. "It's like any playoff team."

Herman Frazier, Hawaii's athletic director, concurred.

"It's Hawaii's Super Bowl," he said. "Our participation in the Sugar Bowl is going to be like Hawaii playing in a Super Bowl."

Still, to speak of the Sugar Bowl as a mere football game, even a really big one, fails to capture the mood.

"For many people here," said Bobby Curran, a Honolulu sports radio announcer and longtime Hawaii follower, "this is the biggest thing to hit Hawaii since statehood."

No more rainbow

To understand the enormity of Hawaii's landmark season, it is important to understand how far the program has come. In 1998, Hawaii finished its season 0-12. Then coach June Jones came to town, and everything changed.

A veteran National Football League coach, Jones brought a swarming, high-wire passing game to Hawaii, and toughened the team's nickname from "Rainbow Warriors" to simply "Warriors." Jones has been a winner at Hawaii, earning a record of 76-40 in nine seasons.

Nonetheless, Jones' teams failed to inspire the zealotry that surrounds big-time college programs such as LSU, Michigan or Southern California. Hawaii's home field, Aloha Stadium, seats just 50,000, and the team has just 22,800 season ticket holders. In fact, even this season, the team attracted middling attendance to most home games, averaging 35,754 for the first four.

Some people attribute the poor attendance to the same thing that has kept undefeated Hawaii from rising to the top of the Bowl Championship Series standings: a weak schedule. Four of Hawaii's opponents this season had combined records of 6-42. And only two of 12 opponents had winning seasons.

"A lot of Hawaii fans were upset by the quality of the Hawaii schedule," said Curran, the local sports announcer. "People just weren't that gung-ho about watching teams like Northern Colorado and Charleston Southern."

But by November, as Hawaii rolled toward a perfect season and its quarterback, Colt Brennan, hit his stride, fans flocked to the stadium. More than 49,000 attended each of the last three games, against Fresno State, Boise State and Washington.

Sitting in a conference room at Hawaii's campus in Oahu's verdant Manoa Valley recently, Frazier was philosophical about the schedule. A former world-class sprinter who won gold and bronze medals in the 1976 Montreal Olympics and captained Arizona State's National Collegiate Athletic Association championship track team, Frazier still has a runner's build and the calm manner of a disciplined athlete.

Frazier notes that Hawaii has a strong schedule in the next few years. In 2008, the team opens against Florida in Gainesville, and has regular-season games with Oregon State and Cincinnati. In subsequent years, Hawaii will play Wisconsin and USC at home.

"We just had a one-year mishap that we were able to fix," he said. But Frazier added: "Would you be sitting here talking to me if we had played USC the first game of the season and Michigan State the last game? I don't know."

But, Frazier said, one thing is certain: Hawaii will be in the Sugar Bowl on New Year's Day.

A 'special' state

Perhaps because of its size and isolation from the U.S. mainland, Hawaii tends more than many places to support residents who attain a national stage. When the teen-age singer Jasmine Trias appeared on the television show "American Idol," for instance, the community rallied behind her and helped drive her to a third-place finish. Likewise, Hawaii-born Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has a groundswell of support in heavily Democratic Hawaii. His $335,363 raised locally is far more than any other Democratic presidential candidate. By contrast, Hawaii's No. 2 money raiser, Hillary Clinton, has raised $42,141 here, according to the Federal Election Commission.

Elaine Hatfield, a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said the excitement surrounding Hawaii football is in part simple and obvious: Hawaii is a sports-crazed place with no pro football team.

"No wonder people are excited," said Hatfield, whose academic works include "Emotional Contagion," a study of the ways in which one person's emotional state can be unconsciously transmitted to another.

Emotional contagion, according to Hatfield, explains things as diverse as the French Revolution's Reign of Terror and the exultant behavior of participants in modern-day tent revivals. Although Hatfield said the excitement surrounding the local football team was not the result of emotional contagion, she said Hawaii's generally strong group identity is contributing to the fervor.

"Hawaii is different culturally from the mainland," she said. "We are a lot more multicultural, for example, and that combines with isolation and size to ensure that we think of ourselves as 'special' and 'different.' "

Hawaii fans are so excited about the game that they are willing to endure what can amount to nearly a full day in crowded airports and cramped airplane and rental car seats to get to New Orleans. Direct nonstop flights between Honolulu and New Orleans don't exist, except for a few charter flights. And one-stop flights quickly filled. That has forced people to take tortuous routes.

Regan Onikama is typical. A Honolulu mortgage broker, Onikama plans to leave Honolulu on Saturday at 9 a.m. on a four-hour flight to Los Angeles. In L.A. he will switch planes for a two-hour flight to Phoenix, where he has another connection to Houston. After arriving in Houston at 2:30 a.m. on Sunday, Onikama plans to rent a car and drive to New Orleans, where he hopes to arrive by 9:30 a.m. Sunday.

Factoring in the five-hour time difference between Honolulu and New Orleans, that's more than 19 hours of travel time. Onikama's return flight leaves Houston at 5:30 a.m. on Thursday, Jan. 3 so he will have to leave New Orleans on Wednesday night to drive back.

Altogether, that's about 40 hours of travel time for the chance to spend about 80 hours in New Orleans, where Onikama says he plans to hit Harrah's New Orleans Casino and Bourbon Street and enjoy some good food.

As for the travel hardships, Onikama shrugged it off.

"I figure this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," he said. "Win or lose, everybody's just excited to go."

Exotic New Orleans

After a week of exams, Hawaii football players returned to the practice field looking anything but rusty. While the linemen did drills, Brennan's squadron of receivers sprinted through innumerable passing plays. Practice ended with a brutal half-hour of wind sprints on a field sodden with Manoa rain.

Afterward, C.J. Hawthorne talked about what it means for him to be going to the Sugar Bowl. A senior wide receiver from Gulfport, Miss., Hawthorne realizes the game in New Orleans will be his last as a Warrior. And he looks forward to showing his teammates around his old stomping grounds.

As exotic as Hawaii has been for Hawthorne -- he took four semesters of Samoan, and Brennan occasionally calls audibles in Samoan -- Hawthorne believes New Orleans will be equally exotic for some of his teammates.

"They're going to see Canal and Bourbon Street, and they're going to go crazy," he said. "Some of the guys, they're going to see things that they've never seen before.

"It's going to be like me going to Hawaii."

The game also will be a reunion of sorts for Korey Reynolds, a freshman running back from Hoover, Ala. Reynolds has 10 old friends from Hoover coming to New Orleans for the game, including two former teammates who now play for Alabama.

Asked about the irony of Hawaii going to the Sugar Bowl while Alabama goes to the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, Reynolds smiled.

"I've been giving them a hard time," Reynolds said of his Crimson Tide friends. "We're a little bit better than them this year."

Reunions aside, Hawthorne stresses that the trip to New Orleans is a working vacation for the Warriors. He plans to warn his teammates away from Bourbon Street.

"Bourbon will steer a lot of people wrong," he said.

And the game is too important to let that happen, he said.

"We've got a chance to do something this team has never done before," he said.